Black Cat

Rilke was an independent spirit, supremely dedicated to the cultivation of his own art. He did not associate himself with any particular literary movement or with any trends in the literature of the period. Scholars sometimes link him with the movement known as modernism, which broke with earlier traditions such as realism and romanticism, but if this is so it would only apply to his later work, written after World War I (1914-18), when modernism began. It is therefore more fruitful to regard Rilke as forging his own path, so “Black Cat” is best understood in terms of the development of his own work. His early work, such as the Book of Hours (1905), explores deep levels of feeling within himself, especially in connection with his relations with God, although Rilke’s god was never the conventional god of Christianity. In other words, the early Rilke was a subjective poet. However, this changed radically when he began working for the sculptor Rodin, who suggested that he look more fully and intensely at the external world and develop poetry that was objective rather than subjective. American poet Robert Bly describes this evolution of Rilke’s work in his short essay “The Object Poem,” which appears in his poetry anthology News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness (1980).